After spending way too much time thinking about ideas, I’ve finally decided to stop overthinking and just build.

Starting today, I’m documenting everything, from the first line of code to hopefully my first paying customer.

I’ll be sharing things like:
- Product decisions
- Wins and failures
- Marketing experiments
- Revenue updates
- Mistakes I make
- What AI tools I’m using
- Honest numbers (when there are any 😄)

My goal is simple: go from $0 to my first sale, then keep growing from there.

If you’re interested in following the journey, leave a follow. I’ll be posting almost everything here on Reddit, and I’d really appreciate honest feedback, criticism, and ideas along the way.
Hopefully this can help other people who are also starting from zero.

Let’s see where this goes 🚀

Hey SaaS community, hope you're all doing good. My SaaS isn't doing well. I've run it for free over the past 2 years. Only 2 months back I completely re-did the whole thing and added pro while still keeping the free tier. But im getting very low retention. Although I've got my first subscriptions which felt very nice but I've burned alot of cash on it and im having a hard time keeping up. Should i call it? What am I doing wrong here? Any suggestions/ criticism is welcome. Thanks.

The SaaS is stepify.tech

Just launched my Saas getleadflow.co

I have 0 users within the first hour of launching but I have 384 people on my waitlist. Sent out emails a minute ago. Lfg.

When do I make my first dollar?

When do I book a vacation to Bali and get to work from my laptop while sipping on some coconut?

Honest answers only please 🙏

We all know the feeling: we get a great SaaS idea, we spend a weekend building it...then somewhere along the way, we think maybe this idea isn't as good as I thought it was

Or you make 1 Reddit post and someone leaves a mean comment saying "Who is this for ?"

We doubt, we go back to the drawing board, and look for another idea, a "better" idea

I submit this to you: the idea does not matter, it's besides the point entirely. The #1 indicator of success for a SaaS is marketing. Where you market it and how you market it

We've all heard about the "I am rich" app that was on the App Store in 2008. The app cost $999, it had 2 screens and did basically nothing

Wanna know the funny part ? That app was bought by 8 people

2 people in Europe and 6 in America, just in case you were saying it won't work where you're from

You have a SaaS idea, and I guarantee that compared to "I am rich", your idea is the cure to cancer. You just aren't marketing it right and for long enough

Now I know you might not be a Christian, and I'm not selling my religion to you, but Proverbs 14:23 says:

"ALL hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty"

That is what the exact verse says. You have worked hard, just get your app in front of people, any people

Here's something that has really started helping me lately: track goals. That is, install Google Analytics on your site, and rather than aim for $100,000,000 in MRR, aim for just 10 website visitors, after 10.....aim for 20, then 50, then 100

Knowing that people are actually seeing what you built will give you new strength

I'm a 19 year old from Zimbabwe who hasn't had a single sale in 4 years either, so believe me, all of this advice comes from stuff I've been though

Love you guys, please stop sabotaging yourself, just believe

Hey, I have recently started working on building my own products and selling them, I frequently post about them on Reddit too but constantly get roasted. Everyone says the solution already exists, everyone knows that, if Google didn't start search engine thinking yahoo already exists, imagine the result of that, now if I have an idea and try to validate it, people say the idea already exists don't work on it, If I build something and post about it they say there's a better one with a lot more feature than yours no one will use it. I know there's a better solution than mine in every field but while starting I can't compete with the companies improving their product for decades, now the main problem is seeing those comments, the people who would be interested in my product will start using my competitors because of those comments, how do you founders find actual clients avoiding these problems? On top of that I'm from a third world country, I don't have any problem in that because I'm from a good family but other people don't have purchasing power to buy my products so my only option is go international for which first option that comes to my mind is Reddit,X or linkedin x and linkedin are shit compared to Reddit but Reddit has it's own set of problems, how to deal with it?

I 've noticed more people around me saying "I asked ChatGPT" instead of "I Googled it."
If you're buying software, researching a service or comparing tools, where do you actually start that now?
Google?
ChatGPT?
Reddit?
Or Somewhere else?
Just interesting whether this is just my bubble or if search habits have really changed.

Hey SaaS community, hope you're all doing good. My SaaS is actually doing pretty well so far, but I feel like I've hit a wall with growth. i've been building Termi Protocol, a niche desktop app for developers that visualizes AI coding agents in a cozy 3D workspace. So far I've had 2,292 unique visitors, 145 registrations, and 70 purchases. I launched on Product Hunt and finished #5 Product of the Day, promoted it on Reddit and LinkedIn, and even tried Instagram and TikTok. The problem is that I don't have a marketing budget, and since it's such a niche product for developers, I'm not sure where to focus next. If you were in my position, what path would you take? How would you grow traffic for a developer focused SaaS without spending much on ads? Any suggestions or criticism are more than welcome. Thanks! I haven't managed to get a lot of views on Instagram and TikTok.

Saas is : https://termiprotocol.com

Hey folks,

I just built my first SaaS extension and I’m not very good at marketing or doing the whole “hey, check out what I made” thing. I’d really appreciate it if you could share any SaaS tools or platforms that are designed for showcasing new products to others. Thanks

A lot of people told me you cant luach without, but it's really hard to build momentum on it,
any advice?

Hey all,

I worked tirelessly for the past few weeks updating my features, pricing and overall UI.

Just launched the new features for my content growth saas just over an hour ago...

I gained valuable feedback from the off which validated my new updates!

Its great to see users making a difference in their content through something I made.

Thought id share this small achievement as it gives momentum for further development and users.

For those thinking about shipping new features or hesitating about creating that new app or saas, JUST DO IT!

Posting this because I think I’m too close to my own product to see what’s actually stopping people from paying for it.
I built FedFinder (fedfinder.net) for small and mid-sized government contractors. The problem I kept running into is that SAM.gov only shows a contract once it’s already posted, so by the time you see it, you’re finding out at the same moment as every other bidder. Same story with grants and RFPs in general, you’re always reacting instead of positioning yourself early.
FedFinder pulls forecasts, sources sought notices, and industry days ahead of time so you can see the work coming before the solicitation drops. It scores each opportunity against your NAICS codes, set asides, and past awards, and surfaces the actual contracting officers and program leads behind it. There’s also an AI operator built into the platform called the Closer that reads whatever you’re looking at and answers things like “should I bid this,” with the public source cited so you can go verify it instead of trusting a black box. It pulls from around 44 public government sources total, SAM.gov, USAspending, Grants.gov, and a bunch of agency specific ones, so it’s covering contracts, grants, and RFPs, not just one lane.
Here’s the part that actually matters for this post: the product is done, the trial is live (14 days, full access, no credit card), and I have zero paying customers. I’ve put real time into marketing it and I genuinely cannot tell anymore if the issue is pricing, trust, positioning, or that I just haven’t found the right room to stand in yet.
If you looked at fedfinder.net for two minutes, what would stop you from starting a trial? And separately, what would it actually take to get you to pay once the trial ends?

Three founders. Full time jobs. Families. No investors.

Ten months ago, we started building QueryPanel. At least, that is what it does today.

Our first version could generate kind of good SQL and charts. Straightforward questions made it look impressive.

Then we tried harder questions and it started failing.

We had convinced ourselves that our system was better than the others. Real questions proved us wrong. That hurt. But it also forced us to stop polishing the demo and rethink the problem.

A database schema can tell a model where the data lives. It cannot explain how a business thinks.

So we rebuilt QueryPanel around four ways companies can teach the system: database annotations, their own business glossary, trusted SQL examples, and tenant specific context.

The real test came while implementing QueryPanel for a customer.

New questions kept coming. Each one exposed another gap. We kept developing the product around what happened in their actual environment, rather than the questions that made our demo look good.

Eventually, we watched QueryPanel answer the kind of complicated question that had broken our first version. It understood the business context, generated the right SQL, and produced a useful chart.

That was the moment it stopped feeling like a clever demo and started feeling like real infrastructure.

Building it was a separate challenge.

I usually worked for two hours in the morning, then another three or four after 9pm. I protected my weekends for my family. My cofounders covered more of the weekend work.

We were rarely in the same workspace. Keeping everyone in sync was painful, and there were hard moments between us.

Eventually, we realized that productivity was not only about shipping the next feature. We also needed to recognize that we were making progress.

Now we meet in person every month and celebrate the small wins. It sounds minor. It made a real difference.

Ten months later, QueryPanel has more than 100 signups and two paying customers generating $5k MRR.

That is not a massive customer base.

It is something better: proof that companies will pay us to solve this problem.

The product now pays its own bills. We can invest in better tooling, more development, and finally some serious marketing without constantly reaching into our own pockets.

We did not raise a round.

We did not quit our jobs.

We just kept building until the side hustle became a business.

Still bootstrapped. Still built around real lives. Just no longer unproven.

Full marketing stack across 3 SaaS products lands at ~$168/mo for me, ~$56/product. Most "SaaS marketing stack" posts push $500+/mo enterprise setups that solo founders don't need. Been running this exact stack for 4 months, honest look at what I kept, killed and skipped.

Analytics ~$0-9/mo. PostHog free tier covers 1M events/month which is plenty for early SaaS, product analytics + session replays included. Plausible at $9/mo for 3 sites is my privacy-friendly web analytics choice, GDPR-compliant out of box. Microsoft Clarity is free and adds heatmaps + recordings on top. Umami works if you already have self-hosted infra. Cut GA4 because the UI is a punishment and the data lag broke my dashboards.

Email ~$0-29/mo. Brevo free tier is 2,000 contacts + 300 emails/day which covers most pre-revenue SaaS. Loops has a free tier and clean automation for product-led SaaS, paid starts $79/mo which is too much for early stage. Resend for transactional at $20/mo, deliverability holds up. Skipped Mailchimp (feature bloat + surprise fees), skipped Ortto at $509/mo for 10K contacts which is enterprise territory. HubSpot Free CRM is the cheat code for the CRM layer.

Social ~$32/mo. PostFast at €10/mo handles 11 platforms including Google Business Profile (Buffer dropped GBP so I can't use them anymore), MCP support lets me schedule from Claude directly. Analytics are thinner than Metricool so I run Metricool at $22/mo for the analytics side. Buffer at $15 tested and cut after GBP drop, Hootsuite at $99 tested and useless for solo. Publer at $12 is cheaper than Metricool for scheduling but weaker analytics.

SEO ~$29/mo. Ranktracker at $29/mo for 200 keywords vs Ahrefs at $129-199/mo, same job at indie scale. Semrush is stronger for content research but at ~$140/mo it's not justifiable pre-revenue. Free option: Google Search Console + Ahrefs free backlink checker + manual keyword research covers most of what a small SaaS needs.

Site/pages ~$38/mo. Framer free tier covers most needs, upgraded to Webflow at $18/mo for one product needing custom CMS. v0 at $20/mo for fast landing page mockups when I'm testing new positioning. Skip Unbounce and Instapage, both enterprise pricing.

Launch/backlinks. Smol Launch premium + Launching Next (free dofollow) + AppSumo (revenue share, dofollow product page) deliver backlinks that compound over years. Paid ads evaporate the second you stop paying so I skip them below $10k MRR.

Full total: $9 Plausible + $20 Resend + €10 PostFast + $22 Metricool + $29 Ranktracker + $18 Webflow + $20 v0 + free PostHog/Brevo/HubSpot/Clarity = ~$168/mo. Add AI stack (Claude Max $100 + Perplexity $20) if you count content workflow, brings it to ~$288/mo.

What's your solo SaaS marketing stack burning per month?? Especially interested in what people cut recently since the cheap tier gets better every quarter

Does anyone really believe them?

10k MRR in a month, oh really!

Two months ago, I made the first commit to my first-ever SaaS.

It didn't even start as a SaaS.

It was supposed to be a little app to help my fiancée with part of her job. Then the cogs started turning...

"If this saves her time, surely other people have the same problem?"

Fast forward two months and somehow I'm building a B2B SaaS.

Which is terrifying.

I'm a Senior Software Engineer full time, so every evening and weekend has become ARQ time. I finish work, eat dinner, open the laptop, and suddenly it's midnight.

I thought building the software would be the difficult bit.

Instead I've found myself learning sales, marketing, SEO, cold calling, email outreach, LinkedIn, pricing, positioning... things I never imagined I'd care about.

I've tried cold emails.

I've tried postcards.

I've cold called more businesses than I can remember.

Some days you spend hours getting nowhere. Other days someone says, "That actually sounds interesting," and suddenly you've got a demo booked.

So far we've done a handful of demos, have a few pilots running, and I'm still chasing that first paying customer.

I think about it way more than I probably should.

Not because of the money, but because someone choosing to spend their own money on something you built from nothing must be an incredible feeling.

I always wondered why founders seem completely consumed by what they're building.

Now I get it.

Every conversation feels like it could be the one. Every email notification makes you wonder if it's finally happened. You spend half your day thinking about features, marketing ideas or people to call next.

It's oddly addictive.

I don't know if that's just what starting a company feels like, but I can absolutely see why people keep doing it.

Hopefully in a few weeks I can come back and say I finally landed customer number one.

Last month I got the call every web guy dreads. A client - small e-commerce shop, does most of his sales through Google - messages me at 9pm: "Traffic's down 60%. What did you do?"

My stomach dropped. I hadn't touched his site in three weeks.

I start digging. Rankings? Gone. Not slipped - gone. Pages that lived on page one for two years had vanished like they never existed. I'm sweating, thinking penalty, thinking hack, thinking I'm about to lose a retainer.

Then I find it. One line. robots: noindex.

A plugin update three weeks earlier had quietly flipped a setting, and Google had been busy de-indexing his best pages the entire time. One word. That's all it took to erase months of work and cost him real money - while everything looked completely fine. The site was up. It loaded. It just wasn't in Google anymore.

That night I couldn't sleep, so I did the paranoid thing and checked every other site I manage. ~40 of them. What I found honestly rattled me:

- 6 had a stray noindex sitting on a page that should've been live

- 4 were bleeding 404s site-wide after old redesigns nobody re-checked

- 3 had straight-up lost their analytics script during a rebuild - months of data, gone, and no one knew

Here's the part that stuck with me: not one of these was a disaster at the moment it happened. They were all tiny. A checkbox. A deploy. A routine update. Nobody re-checks 15 pages after a plugin bump - until the one time it quietly sets your site on fire.

So I changed how I work. Now I keep a "known-good" snapshot of every important page - title, canonical, robots meta, H1 - and I diff against it after any change. Boring. Takes discipline. But it means I find the broken thing, not the client.

Full disclosure: that 9pm phone call annoyed me enough that I eventually built a tool to watch all this automatically, so I'd never get blindsided again. Happy to link it in the comments if anyone wants it - but I don't want to turn a war story into a sales pitch, so the baseline habit works even if you do it by hand.

Anyway - tell me I'm not alone here. What's the dumbest silent break that's ever cost you rankings?

Habit trackers. Productivity apps. The single most saturated niche on earth. Every dev's first app. A graveyard.

I built one anyway. And I even lead my marketing with habit tracking, the most crowded feature I have. somehow it still makes money...

About me: dad, married, solo dev. Started building in November, launched Loggd on Dec 10. It's an all in one personal growth app. Habits, tasks, goals, focus timer, journal, all connected with gamification and a GitHub-style activity graph. Think contribution graph, but the green squares are your real life.

So it's a full system. But "another all-in-one life OS" makes people's eyes glaze over. "Habit tracker" they instantly get. So I lead with the saturated thing, get them in the door, and they discover the rest.

The actual numbers, 6 months in:

- 6,012 registered users

- 100-200 daily active

- 75 Pro subscribers

- ~€250 MRR

- €3,525 total revenue

For the first 4 months I was flat under €200. I thought I was wasting my time. Then I shipped iOS on April 1. May did +€1k. June did €1,133. The line finally started going up. Lifetime deals and the iOS launch did most of it. Just launched Android on July 20, so let's see.

Where the users come from: Threads. 70%+ of everyone. Not clever marketing, I'm bad at that. Just showing up every day and being fully transparent. Real numbers, revenue, what worked, what flopped. People connect with the person, not the app.

The growth is never a curve. One day 1 new user. Next day 2. Then a post hits and 90 sign up overnight. Then back to 5. Silence, spike, silence. The whole skill is showing up on the quiet days and posting anyway.

Saturated niche, most crowded feature up front, a dev who sucks at marketing. And it's still working, slowly. So if someone told you your niche is too crowded, maybe that's not the reason it's not working.

Happy to answer anything honestly.

I’ve been using my own product in my daily work for around six months now, and honestly, it has helped me quite a bit.

But today it caught something unusually useful.

A client gave me a list of websites to add to their monitoring account. I’m also their dev/DevOps guy, so I handled the setup, even though we don’t actually manage all of the sites on the list.

A little while after adding them, I got an alert that one of the websites was showing a fake Cloudflare verification page associated with ClickFix malware.

At first, I assumed it was a false positive.

The page looked like a normal Cloudflare or Turnstile screen. If I had opened the site manually just to see whether it was online, I probably would have assumed it was legitimate and closed the tab.

Then I found out the website doesn’t even use Cloudflare.

I checked it again, and sure enough, the site was infected. The attached screenshot is what visitors were being shown.

I didn’t have access to the website, so I couldn’t fix it myself. I just alerted the client and told them to contact whoever currently manages it.

It was a pretty satisfying reminder that sometimes the best user of your product is you.

I’m also improving the malware-detection side of it now because of this case.

Does your own product genuinely help you in your normal work, or do you mostly build it for other people?

Hey all!

I've been a lurker for a number of years and I think it's finally time for me. I built a tool that I think might actually be worth something!

At its core it basically unifies every customer’s texts and emails into one shared conversation and is built for setting up AI agents to run your communications right from within the platform.

It has a lot of moving parts but I think it can genuinely be the next big platform for managing communications.

I'd love to trade beta testing services with you guys and have a bit of a feedback exchange!

https://commsync.ai

Hope to be the next success story posted about here, I've been seeing a ton of inspiring ones lately!

I've been thinking about how much the form builder space has changed over the last couple of years.

AI has made it much easier to build forms, there are dozens of established competitors, and users seem to expect more than just a drag-and-drop builder now.

If you were starting a form builder SaaS from scratch today, where would you focus?

• AI-generated forms
• Better integrations
• More templates
• Analytics and automation
• Mobile-first experience
• Simpler pricing
• Something else?

More importantly, what do you think is still missing in this market?

I would love to hear from founders who've built SaaS products or from anyone who creates forms regularly using different tools. Real experiences are much more valuable than feature wishlists.

Running a B2B SaaS agency + kept hearing the same question from marketing leaders: "we rank on Google for our category, why are we not showing up in the AI Overview above our own listing?"

So we created a benchmark report wherein we:

• ran 100 buyer-intent queries across 20 B2B SaaS categories
• captured every AI Overview citation + every top-10 organic result for the same query
• analyzed 1,259 AIO citations + 1,000 SERP results.

The intent is to see the difference between 2 content ecosystems, for same queries.

Only 35% of AI Overview sources also rank in Google's top-10 below it.

65% of what the AIO cites doesn't rank on Google at all. The AI Overview is reading a separate corpus. Not a summary of the results below, a different discovery layer entirely.

Some findings that stood out.

1. Products recommended by the AIO barely overlap with Google's rankings

Only 28% of products the AIO recommends also appear in Google's SERP. 72% get named by the AIO without ranking on Google. If your competitor is in Forbes's listicle but you're #1 organic, the AIO can still name them and skip you.

2. YouTube-Reddit inversion

AIO cites YouTube in 51 of 100 queries. Google ranks YouTube in 7 of 100. AIO uses video 7.3x more than Google's own SERP does. Reddit inverts, SERP ranks Reddit in 82/100 queries, AIO only cites Reddit in 43/100. Same query, two completely different source-type preferences.

Most B2B SaaS teams aren't even auditing YouTube. That's the single biggest structural gap between the two surfaces.

3. When they do overlap, it's at the top

72% of shared sources are Google top-5 rankings. Median shared position is #4. So SEO still matters, but only the top 5. Ranking on page 2 buys you nothing in the AIO.

4. 19 of 20 categories diverge from Google but one tracks it

Categories with mature listicle ecosystems (CRM, project management, video hosting, help desk) show 20-27% overlap. The one exception was QuickBooks hosting at 62%, mostly because the category is too niche to have a deep third-party listicle layer. Everywhere else, the AIO reads a listicle corpus that outstrips what fits in Google's top-10.

Practical implication for B2B SaaS

Track AIO citations + Google rankings as 2 separate KPIs. Don't assume one is a proxy for the other.

For AIO visibility, prioritize (in this order):

• Placement in the third-party listicles that already rank for your category (63.4% of AIO citations)
• YouTube presence with product walkthroughs + comparison content (9% of AIO citations, largest under-invested channel)
• Top-5 Google ranking for the 35% of overlap that does exist

If you're spending on generic content marketing hoping the AIO catches up, it won't. Two surfaces, two content ecosystems, plan for both.

Disclosure, this is a research by DerivateX. Full study with all charts + category breakdowns available, drop a comment and I'll share the link.

Hey all,

I'm building a B2B SaaS aimed at early-stage founders (basically a GTM tool for small teams). Still in alpha with a small group of test users, and pricing is honestly the part that's giving me the most trouble before we go live properly.

A few things I'm stuck on, would love to hear from people who've actually been through this:

1. How many tiers is enough? Two, three, should there even be a free/freemium option? I'm worried too many tiers confuses people, but too few means I'm leaving money on the table from different customer segments.
2. Value-based pricing vs cost-plus? My backend leans pretty heavily on AI/LLM calls so my per-user cost isn't fixed, should that variable cost be baked directly into the price, or should I price on perceived value first and just optimize costs on the backend later?
3. For a SaaS targeting cash-strapped early-stage founders, what's actually a reasonable starting price for the base tier? Start low to get traction and raise later, or price higher from day one so you're not fighting an anchoring problem down the road?
4. Annual vs monthly, worth doing a big discount on annual to help cash flow and reduce churn? What discount range actually makes sense without cheapening the product?
5. If anyone's gone through a pricing overhaul after launch (like realized your original model was wrong and had to change it), I'd genuinely love to hear what you learned, not just the textbook framework stuff.

Thanks for reading this wall of text, real experience over theory would help a ton here.

Hey everyone,

Trying to figure out early traction and noticing that advice changes like crazy depending on what you're actually building. What works for a dev tool obviously won't work for an HR platform.

If you’ve already crossed that first milestone, how did you actually pull it off?

Curious to know:

What niche are you in?

What was the exact channel that actually brought in your first users? (Cold email, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc.)

Would love to hear some real stories.

Cheers!

I’m a Project Manager in Australia. And somehow have built this product to its current stage. Driven purely by belief that it’ll solve the current mess we are all buried in within the industry.

I’ve started and built an AI platform built specifically for the construction industry. Rather than replacing tools, the product is built with a completely different approach. It’s a new avenue and not another PM software and not a system of record.

I’ve built a working MVP, had strong feedback from industry, and are now looking at raising capital to accelerate development and bring the product to market.

I have had 2x partnership meetings with a global provider and held initial discussions with other software companies as well.

I’m interested to hear from anyone with experience in angel investing, pre-seed/startup funding, or SaaS investments who might be open to a conversation. The real value is now having it operate within companies, showing a real working product. Given I’m in the industry, embedding within organisations is the easy part!

Even if you’re not personally investing, introductions or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Happy to share more details, a demo, and discuss where we’re headed. Thanks 🤝